Addressing the challenges for improving long-term outcomes in renal transplantation

Renal transplant patients lose their grafts most frequently from chronic allograft nephropathy and their lives from cardiac disease, malignancy, and infection. These are thus the challenges for renal transplant programs for this decade, just as acute rejection was the challenge of the last two decades. Most immunosuppressive protocols aim to minimize acute allograft rejection through heavy induction strategies and powerful but toxic maintenance therapies, counterbalanced by powerful and expensive infection prophylaxis. However, while the short-term results have improved steadily from the 1980s, and despite all the current efforts, the long-term success rates of renal transplants have not improved. Future aims include controlling both rejection and the long-term consequences of toxicity and infection risk. The biological facts that have determined our approach to the use of immunosuppressants have required us to try to balance the conflicting need for control of the allograft response and the inevitable toxicities of our drugs. The early period after transplantation requires maximum immunosuppressive efficacy with minimal ischemia reperfusion and good surgical-related wound healing. The latter period after transplantation requires less immunosuppressive efficacy and avoidance of chronic nephrotoxicity, cardiovascular, and malignancy risk factors. This usually leads to an induction strategy using a biological agent; a calcineurin inhibitor; an antiproliferative agent; and variable use of corticosteroids. In the long term, there are a variety of strategies for dose reduction or elimination of calcineurin inhibitors, incorporation of mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitors, and variable approaches to the risks of continued low-dose corticosteroids. The multiplicity of alternative strategies available testifies to the absence of evidence for a single dominant protocol and the urgent need to determine the relevant early indicators for measuring long-term success.